The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil

27/05/2026

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There is nothing like an arts body to tell people what they don’t want. John McGrath writes of raising funds for The Cheviot, the Stag, and The Black, Black Oil. “The Scottish Arts Council Drama Committee had at first displayed incredulity. They thought Highlanders didn’t want to know about the Clearances, the politics of oil and such, and anyway wouldn’t pay to see a theatre show because they didn’t go to the theatre.” (The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil) It was a point proved wrong not only by the popularity of McGrath’s play, but also by the presence of Eden Court in Inverness, a theatre built in 1976, and now the largest combined art centre in Scotland. So much for arts councils. As for The Cheviot… the play has entered the Scottish consciousness. When it was revived in 2015, the Scotsman critic Joyce McMillan called it “a great masterpiece.” The Arts Council may not have had much interest in exploring the intricacies of Scottish highland and island history in theatrical form, but the locals clearly did, if John Mackenzie’s Play for Today adaptation is anything to go by.  Aired in the summer of 1974, we watch now with a sense of freedom (to invoke the title of another Mackenzie film from 1981) that everybody involved clearly had in the staging of the play, and how much engagement there appeared to be from the audience. Cutaways can sometimes be clumsy devices in documentary accounts of performance, with the director determined to show how much fans are enjoying the concert, gig or play, but in Mackenzie’s work, here, it can seem an integrated part of the production, since vital to McGrath’s purpose was involving the audience in the experience. As McGrath says in his introduction to the play, he wasn’t interested in writing something that would talk down to people, assuming their limitations, but wished as readily to challenge himself in the writing and the actors in the performing. “We knew that it was impossible to underestimate a Highland audience. In knowledge, sophistication, politics, history and wit, they were right there, if not way ahead of us.”
McGrath’s play is a work of agitprop theatre, a piece that isn’t chiefly interested in agitation nor in propaganda, but chiefly in raising one’s consciousness, and giving voice to an inner voice that for a long time was denied outer form. Though McGrath’s play was written in English, it nevertheless attends to the suppression of Highland culture over the centuries, and one of the most obvious aspects was the Gaelic language.  The play announces: ‘‘It begins I suppose, with 1746 – Culloden and all that. The Highlands were in a bit of a mess. Speaking – or singing – the Gaelic language was forbidden.’’ This comes just as Dolina MacLennan starts singing in Gaelic, as the play suggests, just as times have moved on, and nobody was likely to arrest MacLellan, that doesn’t mean history shouldn’t be remembered. If the play is agitprop, it doesn’t so much want to put ideas into people’s minds, but extract from the historical, a past that shouldn’t be forgotten. When agitprop was practised in the Soviet Union, communism was the form of governance; in the UK, McGrath was working within a post-war British consensus, where both major parties (Labour and the Conservatives) accepted modest nationalisation, a strong social safety net, and cultural institutions funded and protected all the better to offer a broad range of opportunities for people who might not be living in urban centres. (No matter the Arts Council’s prejudices.)
Whether this was public funding for theatre groups like 7:84, or numerous playwrights getting the chance to write for television under Play for Today (which McGrath did on several occasions), one sensed a United Kingdom that allowed for a variety of voices. This didn’t mean society was just: the very title of the theatre company comes from an injustice, that 7% owned 84% of the UK’s wealth. Indeed, some believed that McGrath was part of the 7% when he pulled up, in the late 1970s, at a petrol station near Perth. He got out of a ‘gleaming company vehicle,’ and the petrol pump attendant filled up the Volvo estate. The attendant, seeing 7:84 emblazoned on it, asked what it meant. McGrath explained its meaning, and the attendant replied that McGrath needn’t boast about belonging to the elite, an assumption made on the basis of a vehicle that, however new, hardly passed for luxury. It did in the attendant's eyes.  “No need to show it off though, is there?" (Herald) he says. Yet was this the attendant’s false consciousness, or McGrath’s bad faith? There, the attendant was seeing a car that would seem forever to be outside his price range, and there McGrath was driving it as he toured the country informing the people through theatre of the country’s economic divide. Owning a Volvo estate wasn’t going to put McGrath into the 7% per cent, but he would have seemed a lot closer to it than the petrol pump attendant. McGrath would often tell this story, aware of the irony, and that, whatever the statistical reality, modest comfort can seem like a luxury when someone has very little.
Yet part of the purpose of theatre groups like 7:84, and programmes like Play for Today, was to acknowledge a gap that wasn’t only socio-economic, but cultural as well. If urban folk had access to the theatre by living in major cities, how could those outside the main conurbations access the work? This cultural problem was more pronounced than in most other arts: cinema was predicated on the reels travelling from place to place, and books could be as accessible in a London library as in Stornoway. Sure, many films wouldn’t reach Inverness, and many a book wouldn’t be found so easily in an Aviemore library as in an Edinburgh one. Nevertheless, it was a lot easier to get that film to the Highlands and that book to the east coast than a troupe of actors. Both 7:84 and Play for Today tried to resolve this problem, with the former seeing itself so clearly as a touring company, and the latter by producing hundreds of television plays by Dave Hare, Dennis Potter, David Mercer, William Trevor, David Storey and others.
It was a time when culture wasn’t simply cultural capital, a way of defining one’s status in the world as an educated bourgeois, but closer to a cultural Marxism that may now be debased as an alt-right term of abuse, but in the 1970s could be seen as an extension of the socio-political into the aesthetic. Certainly, works like The Cheviot, The Stag, and the Black, Black Oil were made by people who would now be deemed far left, but a better way of looking at it would be to see that they didn’t want to see  anybody left behind. McGrath “realised that if he was to tell a story of the exploitation of working-class people, from the land clearances of the 19th century to the North Sea oil boom of the 1970s, he should do it in a form familiar to those audiences.” As a result, Mark Fisher says, “he threw out anything that smacked of bourgeois theatre, and embraced the techniques of music hall, variety and the ceilidh.” (Guardian) This was a cultural Marxism, if it was cultural Marxism at all, based on grassroots engagement, rather than deracinated assumptions. The locals were up for the task of comprehending complex material if it chimed with their own thoughts. As McGrath himself noted in his introduction to the play. “Direct Marxist analysis of the Clearances (cfDas Kapital), long chunks of readings from eye-witness historical accounts, facts and figures about oil companies and the technicalities of exploration, all were not only grasped but waited for, expected.” As the play explores the Highland Clearances, with many forced to emigrate to Canada and the US, to be replaced by the Cheviot sheep of the title, the play lists figures of depopulation. “In 1755, the population of the seven crofting counties was more than 20% of the population of Scotland. In 1801 it was 18%. In 1851 it was 13%. In 1901 it was 7%. In 1951 it was 5%. And yesterday it was 3%.” These were statistics remaining locals could see with their own eyes, and while The Highlands were beautiful, remote and untouched, this might work wonders for a tourist industry, but from their perspective, it could reveal the steady erosion of communities.
If it weren’t enough that sheep grazed where people once lived, then the problem was exacerbated by the stags, there to be shot at by visitors “coming up here for the peace and quiet and solitude.” If it wasn’t enough that the people were removed to make way for the sheep, and if it wasn’t enough for the stags to occupy the land that once happened to be occupied by people, then where to next for the exploitation of the country? Underground and offshore, as people from elsewhere, and often the States, would secure contracts to extract the oil from Scottish waters. And why not; the Yankees had the know- how Scots couldn’t pretend to possess.  The US first discovered oil in 1859, and had been removing it from the Gulf of Mexico since 1941. But the play indicates that it is one thing to rely on others’ know-how to make the most of one’s resources; quite another to have little control over them. On discovering it, the British government didn’t know what to do about it, and instead of bringing in “these pesky godless government controls like they do in Norway and Algeria and Libya, “oh my God – no, you have a democracy  here like we do.” They allowed the Yanks to divvy up the spoils. So says “a God-fearing, anti-socialist businessman”, as many of the licences went to American companies like Amoco and Mobil, Shello-Esso and Transworld of America.
This needn’t be the US’s fault – who wouldn’t say no to a country gullible enough to hand over great wealth to another country? Yet as the TV version of the play explores, the profit motive was strong and segued into greed and exploitation. Interviewing various riggers who talk about the pay and the conditions, whoever was making money out of the oil, it wasn’t the locals. As one says, “we were treated like animals.” Another insists that he could make more money onshore as a builder’s labourer than working on the rigs.
Does such footage strengthen or weaken the play? Does it make the provocations it offers too grounded; does it make formal properties become too amorphous as it includes documented footage? In answer to the first, it would seem not: McGrath’s play owes little to the mastery of an Ibsen or a Chekhov, self-contained works that brought a new compactness to modern theatre. McGrath’s play is closer to Brechtian polemic, one that can bring into the production whatever will create a broader consciousness in the audience, and broaden the context of what theatre can be. Brecht may, finally, not have said “Art is not a mirror to reflect reality, but a hammer with which to shape it”,  but it makes sense that it was commonly attributed to him, and it wouldn’t have been out of place coming from McGrath’s mouth either. This is a theatrical tradition that insists on dialogue and engagement, over nuance and subtext. It uses whatever techniques and methods are required to bring a viewer to an awareness of their situation, but also doesn’t assume that this excludes the audience who, in some ways, will be well aware of the reality the playwright exposes.
McGrath’s play may indeed be a mirror as readily as a hammer, a work that reflects back on the audience whose parents, grandparents, great grandparents and themselves would have lived through what the play examines. It may be talking at the audience, but it isn’t looking down on them. From a certain perspective, art isn’t supposed to be so ideologically exposed, as such raw nerves should be covered in dramatic flesh. There may be some truth to this, but it can also be a good excuse for artists to ignore the political, even when it stares them in the face. McGrath stares back and asks the viewer to do likewise, creating a scowl of a play that, in its Play for Today adaptation, becomes at the same time a howl of rage at a country deemed consistently mistreated.
That might be too much for many, but McGrath thought not, even to those who might be deemed the perpetrators of many of the injustices. As he would say in the intro about the toffs who turned up for the production: “It seems to be a deliberate tactic of the ruling class under attack in public, at least in the Highlands, to be seen sportingly taking it on the chin, thereby eliciting admiration from the people they are exploiting for their courage, pluck and open-mindedness.”(The Cheviot the Stag and the Black, Black Oil) That doesn’t mean the answer is to chin these chinless wonders. The problem is structural more than personal, and as long as the locals give away or have taken from them the means of production, their purpose is to find non-violent ways to win them back. From this perspective, the play might not be deemed much of a success. From another, Scotland didn’t have its own parliament when McGrath wrote the play, and it does now, and, under devolution, various land acts have been passed. These may be modest changes, yet they can be seen as progress, and this progress has been helped along by the a play that combines political tracts and facts, comic sketches and Gaelic singing, all wrapped up in a production that has the air of a good Ceilidh, one that serves less the romantic image of the Highlands, than the force of a country insistently announcing its own roots and culture.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil

There is nothing like an arts body to tell people what they don’t want. John McGrath writes of raising funds for The Cheviot, the Stag, and The Black, Black Oil. “The Scottish Arts Council Drama Committee had at first displayed incredulity. They thought Highlanders didn’t want to know about the Clearances, the politics of oil and such, and anyway wouldn’t pay to see a theatre show because they didn’t go to the theatre.” (The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil) It was a point proved wrong not only by the popularity of McGrath’s play, but also by the presence of Eden Court in Inverness, a theatre built in 1976, and now the largest combined art centre in Scotland. So much for arts councils. As for The Cheviot… the play has entered the Scottish consciousness. When it was revived in 2015, the Scotsman critic Joyce McMillan called it “a great masterpiece.” The Arts Council may not have had much interest in exploring the intricacies of Scottish highland and island history in theatrical form, but the locals clearly did, if John Mackenzie’s Play for Today adaptation is anything to go by.  Aired in the summer of 1974, we watch now with a sense of freedom (to invoke the title of another Mackenzie film from 1981) that everybody involved clearly had in the staging of the play, and how much engagement there appeared to be from the audience. Cutaways can sometimes be clumsy devices in documentary accounts of performance, with the director determined to show how much fans are enjoying the concert, gig or play, but in Mackenzie’s work, here, it can seem an integrated part of the production, since vital to McGrath’s purpose was involving the audience in the experience. As McGrath says in his introduction to the play, he wasn’t interested in writing something that would talk down to people, assuming their limitations, but wished as readily to challenge himself in the writing and the actors in the performing. “We knew that it was impossible to underestimate a Highland audience. In knowledge, sophistication, politics, history and wit, they were right there, if not way ahead of us.”
McGrath’s play is a work of agitprop theatre, a piece that isn’t chiefly interested in agitation nor in propaganda, but chiefly in raising one’s consciousness, and giving voice to an inner voice that for a long time was denied outer form. Though McGrath’s play was written in English, it nevertheless attends to the suppression of Highland culture over the centuries, and one of the most obvious aspects was the Gaelic language.  The play announces: ‘‘It begins I suppose, with 1746 – Culloden and all that. The Highlands were in a bit of a mess. Speaking – or singing – the Gaelic language was forbidden.’’ This comes just as Dolina MacLennan starts singing in Gaelic, as the play suggests, just as times have moved on, and nobody was likely to arrest MacLellan, that doesn’t mean history shouldn’t be remembered. If the play is agitprop, it doesn’t so much want to put ideas into people’s minds, but extract from the historical, a past that shouldn’t be forgotten. When agitprop was practised in the Soviet Union, communism was the form of governance; in the UK, McGrath was working within a post-war British consensus, where both major parties (Labour and the Conservatives) accepted modest nationalisation, a strong social safety net, and cultural institutions funded and protected all the better to offer a broad range of opportunities for people who might not be living in urban centres. (No matter the Arts Council’s prejudices.)
Whether this was public funding for theatre groups like 7:84, or numerous playwrights getting the chance to write for television under Play for Today (which McGrath did on several occasions), one sensed a United Kingdom that allowed for a variety of voices. This didn’t mean society was just: the very title of the theatre company comes from an injustice, that 7% owned 84% of the UK’s wealth. Indeed, some believed that McGrath was part of the 7% when he pulled up, in the late 1970s, at a petrol station near Perth. He got out of a ‘gleaming company vehicle,’ and the petrol pump attendant filled up the Volvo estate. The attendant, seeing 7:84 emblazoned on it, asked what it meant. McGrath explained its meaning, and the attendant replied that McGrath needn’t boast about belonging to the elite, an assumption made on the basis of a vehicle that, however new, hardly passed for luxury. It did in the attendant's eyes.  “No need to show it off though, is there?" (Herald) he says. Yet was this the attendant’s false consciousness, or McGrath’s bad faith? There, the attendant was seeing a car that would seem forever to be outside his price range, and there McGrath was driving it as he toured the country informing the people through theatre of the country’s economic divide. Owning a Volvo estate wasn’t going to put McGrath into the 7% per cent, but he would have seemed a lot closer to it than the petrol pump attendant. McGrath would often tell this story, aware of the irony, and that, whatever the statistical reality, modest comfort can seem like a luxury when someone has very little.
Yet part of the purpose of theatre groups like 7:84, and programmes like Play for Today, was to acknowledge a gap that wasn’t only socio-economic, but cultural as well. If urban folk had access to the theatre by living in major cities, how could those outside the main conurbations access the work? This cultural problem was more pronounced than in most other arts: cinema was predicated on the reels travelling from place to place, and books could be as accessible in a London library as in Stornoway. Sure, many films wouldn’t reach Inverness, and many a book wouldn’t be found so easily in an Aviemore library as in an Edinburgh one. Nevertheless, it was a lot easier to get that film to the Highlands and that book to the east coast than a troupe of actors. Both 7:84 and Play for Today tried to resolve this problem, with the former seeing itself so clearly as a touring company, and the latter by producing hundreds of television plays by Dave Hare, Dennis Potter, David Mercer, William Trevor, David Storey and others.
It was a time when culture wasn’t simply cultural capital, a way of defining one’s status in the world as an educated bourgeois, but closer to a cultural Marxism that may now be debased as an alt-right term of abuse, but in the 1970s could be seen as an extension of the socio-political into the aesthetic. Certainly, works like The Cheviot, The Stag, and the Black, Black Oil were made by people who would now be deemed far left, but a better way of looking at it would be to see that they didn’t want to see  anybody left behind. McGrath “realised that if he was to tell a story of the exploitation of working-class people, from the land clearances of the 19th century to the North Sea oil boom of the 1970s, he should do it in a form familiar to those audiences.” As a result, Mark Fisher says, “he threw out anything that smacked of bourgeois theatre, and embraced the techniques of music hall, variety and the ceilidh.” (Guardian) This was a cultural Marxism, if it was cultural Marxism at all, based on grassroots engagement, rather than deracinated assumptions. The locals were up for the task of comprehending complex material if it chimed with their own thoughts. As McGrath himself noted in his introduction to the play. “Direct Marxist analysis of the Clearances (cfDas Kapital), long chunks of readings from eye-witness historical accounts, facts and figures about oil companies and the technicalities of exploration, all were not only grasped but waited for, expected.” As the play explores the Highland Clearances, with many forced to emigrate to Canada and the US, to be replaced by the Cheviot sheep of the title, the play lists figures of depopulation. “In 1755, the population of the seven crofting counties was more than 20% of the population of Scotland. In 1801 it was 18%. In 1851 it was 13%. In 1901 it was 7%. In 1951 it was 5%. And yesterday it was 3%.” These were statistics remaining locals could see with their own eyes, and while The Highlands were beautiful, remote and untouched, this might work wonders for a tourist industry, but from their perspective, it could reveal the steady erosion of communities.
If it weren’t enough that sheep grazed where people once lived, then the problem was exacerbated by the stags, there to be shot at by visitors “coming up here for the peace and quiet and solitude.” If it wasn’t enough that the people were removed to make way for the sheep, and if it wasn’t enough for the stags to occupy the land that once happened to be occupied by people, then where to next for the exploitation of the country? Underground and offshore, as people from elsewhere, and often the States, would secure contracts to extract the oil from Scottish waters. And why not; the Yankees had the know- how Scots couldn’t pretend to possess.  The US first discovered oil in 1859, and had been removing it from the Gulf of Mexico since 1941. But the play indicates that it is one thing to rely on others’ know-how to make the most of one’s resources; quite another to have little control over them. On discovering it, the British government didn’t know what to do about it, and instead of bringing in “these pesky godless government controls like they do in Norway and Algeria and Libya, “oh my God – no, you have a democracy  here like we do.” They allowed the Yanks to divvy up the spoils. So says “a God-fearing, anti-socialist businessman”, as many of the licences went to American companies like Amoco and Mobil, Shello-Esso and Transworld of America.
This needn’t be the US’s fault – who wouldn’t say no to a country gullible enough to hand over great wealth to another country? Yet as the TV version of the play explores, the profit motive was strong and segued into greed and exploitation. Interviewing various riggers who talk about the pay and the conditions, whoever was making money out of the oil, it wasn’t the locals. As one says, “we were treated like animals.” Another insists that he could make more money onshore as a builder’s labourer than working on the rigs.
Does such footage strengthen or weaken the play? Does it make the provocations it offers too grounded; does it make formal properties become too amorphous as it includes documented footage? In answer to the first, it would seem not: McGrath’s play owes little to the mastery of an Ibsen or a Chekhov, self-contained works that brought a new compactness to modern theatre. McGrath’s play is closer to Brechtian polemic, one that can bring into the production whatever will create a broader consciousness in the audience, and broaden the context of what theatre can be. Brecht may, finally, not have said “Art is not a mirror to reflect reality, but a hammer with which to shape it”,  but it makes sense that it was commonly attributed to him, and it wouldn’t have been out of place coming from McGrath’s mouth either. This is a theatrical tradition that insists on dialogue and engagement, over nuance and subtext. It uses whatever techniques and methods are required to bring a viewer to an awareness of their situation, but also doesn’t assume that this excludes the audience who, in some ways, will be well aware of the reality the playwright exposes.
McGrath’s play may indeed be a mirror as readily as a hammer, a work that reflects back on the audience whose parents, grandparents, great grandparents and themselves would have lived through what the play examines. It may be talking at the audience, but it isn’t looking down on them. From a certain perspective, art isn’t supposed to be so ideologically exposed, as such raw nerves should be covered in dramatic flesh. There may be some truth to this, but it can also be a good excuse for artists to ignore the political, even when it stares them in the face. McGrath stares back and asks the viewer to do likewise, creating a scowl of a play that, in its Play for Today adaptation, becomes at the same time a howl of rage at a country deemed consistently mistreated.
That might be too much for many, but McGrath thought not, even to those who might be deemed the perpetrators of many of the injustices. As he would say in the intro about the toffs who turned up for the production: “It seems to be a deliberate tactic of the ruling class under attack in public, at least in the Highlands, to be seen sportingly taking it on the chin, thereby eliciting admiration from the people they are exploiting for their courage, pluck and open-mindedness.”(The Cheviot the Stag and the Black, Black Oil) That doesn’t mean the answer is to chin these chinless wonders. The problem is structural more than personal, and as long as the locals give away or have taken from them the means of production, their purpose is to find non-violent ways to win them back. From this perspective, the play might not be deemed much of a success. From another, Scotland didn’t have its own parliament when McGrath wrote the play, and it does now, and, under devolution, various land acts have been passed. These may be modest changes, yet they can be seen as progress, and this progress has been helped along by the a play that combines political tracts and facts, comic sketches and Gaelic singing, all wrapped up in a production that has the air of a good Ceilidh, one that serves less the romantic image of the Highlands, than the force of a country insistently announcing its own roots and culture.

© Tony McKibbin